Friday, July 8, 2011

"Prodded by grieving parents, Spanish judges are investigating hundreds of charges that infants were abducted and sold for adoption over a 40-year period. What may have begun as political retaliation for leftist families during the dictatorship of Gen.Francisco Francoappears to have mutated into a trafficking business in which doctors, nurses and even nuns colluded with criminal networks."The cases, which could eventually run into the thousands, are jolting a country still shaken by the spoken and unspoken terrors of Spain’s 1936-39 Civil War and Franco’s rule...."Spain’s judiciary was forced into action after Anadir, an association formed to represent people searching for missing children or parents, filed its first complaints in late January. Attorney General Cándido Conde-Pumpido announced on June 18 that 849 cases were being examined, adding that 162 already could be classified as criminal proceedings because of evidence pointing to abductions...."The cases of disappeared infants stretch from 1950 to 1990, continuing well after Franco’s death in 1975. It is not known whether government officials played any role...."Antonio Barroso, the president of Anadir, said he believed that over time Spain became a hub for gangs operating an international trade, with many newborns sold into adoption overseas...."Mr. Barroso, 42, founded Anadir last year, after being told by a friend that they were both adopted. He took DNA samples from the woman he had always known as his mother and confronted her after tests showed that his sample and hers were not a match. She admitted paying a nun for a baby and misleading her son about his birth for decades...."As in Mr. Barroso’s case, a few nuns have confessed to selling children, but without suggesting that they were part of a criminal network...."During the Franco regime and in its immediate aftermath, “you simply didn’t challenge what an official told you,” said María Luisa Puro Rodríguez, a former tobacco factory worker who claims that her newborn was abducted in 1976 from a Malaga hospital. “We now thankfully live in a society where it is normal to question what we hear,” she said. “I’ve learned this bitter lesson and am now ready to fight all the way to find out what actually happened.”